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Overview

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press, is delighted to announce that Nicole Sealey is the winner of the fourth annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named will be published by Northwestern University Press with a planned launch party at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in January 2016.

At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this slim volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving "as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end."

Product Details

About the Author

NICOLE SEALEY was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Apopka, Florida. Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow as well as the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her other honors include the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award, and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents The First Person Who Will Live To Be One Hundred and Fifty Years OldHas Already Been Born Medical History Instead of Executions, Think Death Erections Candelabra with Heads Virginia is for Lovers Unframed Object Permanence Legendary And Clue Cue Imagine Sisyphus Happy Even the Gods Legendary In Igboland

Editorial Reviews

"… this is a collection that reveals what I consider to be the true power of poetry—that a poem is a code, a rogue computer virus, a simulacrum all at once, and that it performs a gentle act of revolution not only against singular meaning, but against the reader’s and even the poet’s attempts to control and deploy it in singular ways.” – Chris Abani